Twitter

When Ghostcrawler started tweeting I remember remarking how fantastic and efficient that system was over the official forums because of the strict character limit. Players need to get to the point instead of pontificating in page-long paragraphs, and GC just answers questions instead of spending an additional paragraph reassuring the player he’s rebuking that they are still a special snowflake and to please keep playing Warcraft.

I’ve tweeted “at” him a few times since then with questions, and early on he did respond to a couple of them, but since it became known that @Ghostcrawler was the place to make demands of the WoW development team it seems to have exploded a bit, so it’s understandable that he can’t spend his valuable time responding to everything.

Well, that and he’s already spending all his time responding to this guy:

That guy gets a response. Questions about development focus are ignored, but “I LEF WOW BCOS U FUKED IT” is apparently worth the time of one of the most senior WoW developers.

I’m not one of those awesome people who assumes that others want or need to hear every idea that pops into their head; I prefer to spend time and careful consideration coming to a conclusion I can believe in before I feel like I have something worth contributing, and even then I’m hesitant. It’s taken this many years of blogging for me to become comfortable expressing myself on my own web page, let alone someone else’s. So I find the fact that that guy is awarded a conversation and while I’m being ignored pretty demoralising.

I think the GC twitter experiment hasn’t quite met its aim. The beginning of the end was when Mr Crawler started using multiple tweets for a single paragraph. That’s not what Twitter is– keeping it short is the whole point. He’s let himself go, giving in to his inclination to explain things in a way that dumb people can’t take the wrong way, and I think that’s a huge shame.